Starred review from July 16, 2012
In a volume that will delight train buffs—and hopefully others—English historian and railway expert Wolmar (On the Wrong Line) examines the rise and fall of railroads in America, with a detailed look at how they influenced and directed the growth of the country for more than a century. He spares no punches as he looks at both the positive and negative aspects of the industry, from its chaotic, privatized, and state-run beginnings in the 1830s through its unprecedented spread to its near extinction in the mid-20th century. Wolmar follows the evolution of the technology required to facilitate such an enterprise, delves into the massive corruption underlying the system during its heyday, and explores its impact on the Civil War—“the first true railroad war.” Time and again, he concludes that America could not have grown or prospered without the spread of the railroad, from Chicago’s rise as a transportation hub to consolidation of the myriad smaller lines into several major firms. Finally, he explores the creation of Amtrak. The end result is a fascinating, even indispensable look at one of America’s essential historical components. 16 pages of b&w photos; maps. Agent: Inkwell Management.
Starred review from October 15, 2012
Wolmar, a prolific author of railroading titles, has produced a broad survey history of U.S. trains from their beginnings to the present. He covers the early periods of rapid expansion and improvement, the Civil War, and the transcontinental race. One theme running throughout the narrative is how the railroads have knit the country together and ultimately changed it and the American people. He also examines how the American attitude changed from viewing railroads as creators of prosperity to fearing them as heartless, corrupt monopolies. As a result, Wolmar explains, railroads entered the 20th century under tight regulation with poor labor relations and insufficient profitability to cover capital costs. Faced with growing competition from new forms of transportation, railroads failed in a long downward spiral, followed by their recent resurgence through consolidation and deregulation. VERDICT As he did for global railroad history in his Blood, Iron, & Gold, Wolmar masterfully condenses the history of American rail into a lively and lucid work that is highly recommended to all.--Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 1, 2012
Popular historian Wolmar (Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways, 2010) charts the sometimes haphazard, sometimes avaricious, sometimes puzzling history of America's railroads. "I realize that it is somewhat cheeky of me, a Brit, to try to write a concise history of American railroads," he writes early on. Cheeky, perhaps, but as he also writes, an outsider's perspective on what has been seen as a consummately American adventure can be helpful--particularly since world history isn't without comparable ventures, such as the building of railroads across Siberia and Africa. Yet, as Wolmar rightly notes, the railroads played a key role in uniting the United States, even if one of the signal moments of railroad history wasn't quite all it was cracked up to be. That is, the building of the transcontinental line, as commemorated by the driving of a golden spike in Utah in 1869, was a symbolic gesture of sorts; it wasn't until a bridge was built over the Missouri River three years later that a person could truly travel across the continent without leaving the rails. Further, "there never has been a single railroad company stretching from East Coast to West." All of this does nothing to diminish the accomplishment of introducing the new technology of the railroad and extending it over thousands of miles in the space of just three decades, work carried out by millions of man-hours of hard labor but planned out and capitalized on by men whose names are bywords today, such as Carnegie, Mellon and Stanford. Wolmar acknowledges the "corruption, cheating, purloining of government funds, reckless building practices, and astonishing greed" that went into the making of the transcontinental system, but his purpose is less political than historian Richard White's sweeping condemnation of the robber barons of yore in Railroaded (2011). Wolmar, it seems, has no purpose other than crafting a critical but admiring study of a triumph of engineering, and in this he has succeeded. A solid and, yes, concise look at the railroad's past, with a rousing call at the end for a new and improved rail system to carry the nation forward.
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September 15, 2012
Wolmar, a noted historian specializing in the British railway industry, here turns his attention to American railroads (which, at their peak in 1916, covered 254,037 miles of track). He focuses mostly on the nineteenth century; the twentieth century, he notes, saw mostly decline and waning influence, but it was in the 1800s that railroads were born, grew to maturity, and became the country's dominant form of transportation. Wolmar is clearly in love with his subjectit's easy to imagine him as a sort of walking encyclopedia of railroad loreand his enthusiasm for his material shines through on every page. He finds the decline and increasing irrelevance of the railroadespecially the passenger railsa deeply saddening aspect of contemporary life, and he makes a convincing case that, in losing rail travel as a fundamental human experience, we've lost a hugely important part of ourselves and our history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)